Explore Diverse Voices

I remember being in a hallway, at the end of that hallway was a corridor, with the option to go left or right. If I went left down the corridor at the end of the hallway, at the end of that corridor, was an elevator. If I went right down the corridor at the end

Betsy Sholl’s tenth poetry collection, As If a Song Could Save You, winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry, is published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Robbie Gamble: I’m intrigued by the genesis of book titles, and your title, As If a Song Could Save You, draws me in because it encourages different readings.

A golden shovel after Suheir Hammad   A hummingbird lavishes the lilac on the first morning I am by myself and the open window ushers in decanted perfume, sea, rain on the brink of falling. What slipshape prayers a woman must make of her body. To write my way out of the stories of war

We held each other as our bodies turned to smoke and rose above the burning leaves. Hawks plunged through us, carrying bits of us in their beaks. We settled on roofs, clung to nests and nets. We drifted and drifted like cirrus clouds, like long tongues licking the sky, like glittery trails. Below, mounds of

“Danny died Tuesday,” Parker’s tight voice announces.

“I’m not having a good day,” I tell the answering machine, refusing to pick up…

Today, two teams tried to tackle taboo topics too turbulent to transcribe. The titillating, transcendental triceratops, tirelessly tries to triumph, teeth taken task to task tail to tail. Together they tried to tie the two toucans to the timber to tell them two tall tales, till treelike tutors touched the tender tension to take the

to wash clothes on a saturday afternoon among the workers shot during the rural strikes of 1920 and 1921 there were surely indigenous men who forty years earlier had freely roamed the southern territories the peasants as they were called asked for saturday afternoon to wash clothes those whom we’d today call the indigent williches

Doesn’t the name bring to mind a dangerous woman at a table in the back corner of a smoky bar? The kind you walk into after disembarking from a six-month stint trawling the ocean, your skin indiscernible from salted cod? Aren’t you both afraid and compelled by her, cloaked as she is in her dark

Your chest is a jug of orange juice,  a gasoline pump,  and this prayer is lazy, just as it should be.  You rise  as if it were for you (and maybe  it is).  Your legs are now the rhinestone in the navel of a belly dancer  as a pair of diamonds watch on,  gaze locked,

1 In a tree — a child In a blooming cherry tree — a childin a white gown White on whitein the night —a child, warm from sleep Climb a cherry treesaid the voicein the night All alone in a treein a globe of white Her house on fireshadows flutteringbursts of light, shouts Be with

/ forecast / errors /   image may contain palm trees sky clouds forecast errors image ocean open eye of a five-category hurricane may be twelve hours of a monstrous burgeoning storm contain winds of a hundred sixty miles an hour image spa glassy hotels tennis courts golf courses pools may be women crying in

My Yale professor who taught the history of Southeast Asia described the Mekong River as one of the most fertile. The monsoon causes the river water to rise above the trees, and when it recedes, numerous fish hang from the trees along the river. When my small airplane from Bangkok flew low over the Mekong River

the sunflower aches her long neck under duress of a blue roof’s eave her seed draws evening’s edge thin lines of black and white pinstripe yearn for unity. wine poured out burns closer to the stem’s sacrifice. roots, unmentionable. deep seeking. whole as the hovered sea carried in. currents pull color in bright directions. cool

Cri de Coeur Some years ago, in a workshop on whiteness I was leading, a delegation from the local Friends’ Meeting was among the participants. One of them was a very elderly woman, so disabled she was nearly bent double and moved slowly, with great difficulty. I’m saying she had every excuse to stay home.

Patricia Ann McNair, author of the recently released story collection Responsible Adults, the acclaimed essay collection And These Are the Good Times, and the award-winning story collection The Temple of Air, is an old soul, having lived many lives (gas station manager, medical volunteer in Honduras, bartender, mushroom breeder, Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading floor worker,

Technically, she says, our heads are always moving faster than our feet. Technically. Unless you’re walking on your hands, says Julia, and she flips herself upwards into a handstand to demonstrate. She’s never been stable enough to actually walk, actually pick up one hand and put it down in a new place, even for one

Translated from Spanish by Stephen Kessler   The sky cut up by bars, cells of so many hopeless jails The rounded light of the ox’s eye and a sailor once more defying the storm. Sky bloody with senseless falling missiles, because of so many treasured hatreds. The most intense blue of a huge twilight under

“If you were going to date a kitchen appliance, which would it be?” Zach is reading from a book of “what-ifs”—a gift from his little sister—as I drive us eighty miles east to his best friend Bobby’s house.

Even in China, the fans no longer

give a damn about Deep Purple’s last world…

Made Manby Jendi ReiterLittle Red Tree Press, 2022 140 pages   A quick scan of the table of contents of Made Man, Jendi Reiter’s third poetry collection, indicates that the reader is in for a comitragic, day-glo accented, culture-hopping, snort-inducing, gender-interrogating rollercoaster of a ride. Titles like “It’s Not Sensory Processing Disorder, You’re a Werewolf,”

After Alice Walker  Glory! Glory! Glory! when Breonna Taylor did not walk back out of her apartment, i found refuge in instagram thread of videos where Black people are full of joy. come, let  me show you a sanctuary made of deep dimples and gummed smiles.in the first video, i remember the forgotten humanity in

In the summer of 1948 my dad rented a cottage on Cape Cod from an Italian man named François. Dad was a thirty year-old bachelor from a family of lapsed Jews. He’d fought in Okinawa, come home with blown eardrums, gone into business, and now he was enjoying summer weekends in the honeysuckle air of

Auguries & DivinationsBy Heather Treseler, Bauhan Publishing,2024, 120 pages $18.00   Heather Treseler’s debut poetry collection, Auguries & Divinations, which won the 2023 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, takes as its cover, Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters and a Bird Trap.” This painting ostensibly depicts villagers in a winter scene,

The roads are slick, freshly coated with autumn leaves mixed with last night’s rain.